Claude McKay's 'If We Must Die': Literature as Call to Armed Resistance

Claude McKay's 1919 sonnet 'If We Must Die' — 'Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack / Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!' — circulated widely in the early 1920s among Black Americans as an assertion of the right to self-defense against racial terror. Published in The Liberator, the poem was later quoted by Winston Churchill (without attribution) to rally the British during World War II. It represented the emergence of a militant Black literary voice that rejected accommodationism and asserted armed resistance to lynching.